#01Oct 19, 2026
cs.CV
Real-Time Radar Semantic and Panoptic Scene Understanding
Santosh Parit, Julia Hindel, Rohit Mohan and 4 more
Robust scene understanding under varying environmental conditions is essential for safe autonomous driving. While cameras and LiDAR degrade in adverse weather and poor lighting, Frequency-Modulated Continuous-Wave (FMCW) spinning radar provides dependable 360° perception at extended ranges with minimal compute cost. However, real-time FMCW radar scene understanding is challenging due to complex signal returns, limited temporal resolution, and scarce annotated datasets. We introduce StreamRPS, a novel framework for streaming FMCW radar panoptic segmentation, comprising an automated label-generation pipeline via LiDAR scene completion and a real-time streaming network for semantic and panoptic segmentation. Our encoder-decoder streaming architecture comprises a radar-specific hierarchical Transformer encoder and task-specific decoders for semantic or panoptic prediction. Our encoder introduces a stem to capture range-dependent signatures, anisotropic patch embeddings to preserve angular resolution, and axial polar attention to separately model the periodic azimuth and bounded range axes. We further introduce azimuth roll rotation augmentation to simulate ego-vehicle rotation during training. Comprehensive experiments on the SAX and BOREAS datasets validate both our auto-labeling methodology and streaming segmentation network against established baselines. We outperform the strongest baseline by at least 1.4pp while processing sectors at over 400 FPS in a 4-sector streaming setting. We additionally provide manual annotations for 100 SAX radar scans, enabling independent evaluation of the entire framework.
#02Oct 19, 2026
cs.CV
GenOlympiad: Benchmarking Frontier Image Models at Their Capability Boundaries
Xi Hu, Martin Bell, Liang Zheng
Text-to-image models have made tremendous progress and can produce high-quality images. However, a question which would be asked in any other discipline is where the frontier models fall short. We introduce GenOlympiad, a benchmark which provides the most challenging text prompts from nine capability axes for stress-testing frontier text-to-image models. The assessed capabilities include generating large quantities, performing deep reasoning, ensuring hard physical consistency, following complex rules and so on. The prompts are designed such that prompt alignment is visually verifiable (e.g., counting) instead of relying on subjectiveness (e.g., style). Based on this, we develop an automated evaluation framework which decomposes the prompt into easy and hard questions, and for most hard questions, draws help lines to ground evidence for accurate grading. We evaluate 20+ strong text-to-image models, including Nano Banana Pro, GPT-Image-2.5, Seedream-5.0 and so on. We report that even the best-performing T2I model (Nano Banana Pro) only achieves a strict score of 23.9 out of 100 and that coding models such as GPT-6 Astra have higher prompt alignment scores (but not as visually pleasing). We also derive insights in model evolution, alignment with Elo scores, and effectiveness of our grounding-based evaluation protocol. Code is available at https://github.com/GenOlympiad/GenOlympiad and the project page is at https://genolympiad.github.io/
#03Oct 19, 2026
cs.LG
CAVA: Complementary-Label-Aware Data Valuation
Tan-Ha Mai, Hsuan-Tien Lin, Vu Nguyen
Complementary-label learning (CLL) trains a classifier from labels that name a class an instance does not belong to. Such labels are cheap to collect from crowdworkers or vision-language models (VLMs), making them attractive for large-scale annotation. However, both sources can mistakenly assign the true class as the complementary label. Such annotation errors are particularly harmful in CLL because the model is explicitly trained to suppress the correct answer. Optimal transport (OT) data valuation identifies harmful samples by comparing training data with a clean validation set, but transferring it directly to CLL creates a semantic mismatch: label $c$ means not class $c$ in the training but class $c$ in the validation. We show that this makes the OT label groups noisy mixtures whose behavior depends on the noise rate. The transferred score is informative only at sufficiently high noise, becomes uninformative at the crossover rate $1/M$ for $M$ classes, and reverses below it, where practical CLL annotation typically operates. We propose CAVA, which introduces a complementary label cost and a label margin that isolates the contribution of each complementary label to the transport potential. The margin keeps a consistent direction across noise rates, detects diagonal noise with a parameter-free threshold of closed-form precision, and allows detected samples to be recycled as ordinary-label supervision. On synthetic and human-annotated benchmarks, CAVA separates diagonal noise almost perfectly where directly transferred OT valuation performs worse than random. With only a fraction of the clean validation data, it also improves every CLL objective we evaluate, showing that OT-based valuation becomes reliable once the semantics of complementary supervision are modeled explicitly.
#04Oct 19, 2026
cs.CV
PICA-WAM: Visual Perturbation Invariance via Cross-Appearance Self-Alignment in World Action Models
Yude Zou, Yifei Yao, Guanbo Jiao and 3 more
World Action Models (WAMs) jointly predict future video and generate actions, yet remain sensitive to task-irrelevant visual perturbations, i.e., changes in visual appearance that should not affect robot behavior. We identify a gap in conventional WAM training: video prediction encourages representations to preserve appearance information, while action generation does not explicitly enforce invariance to task-irrelevant appearance. Data augmentation exposes WAMs to such perturbations but does not require perturbed and nominal observations to produce consistent action representations, and alignment with external pretrained features does not guarantee the desired invariance. To address this gap, we propose PICA-WAM, a self-supervised training framework that casts perturbation invariance as an auxiliary cross-appearance self-alignment task for WAMs. An exponential-moving-average (EMA) teacher processes the nominal observation to provide a deeper-layer target, while the online WAM processes a perturbed observation and aligns its shallower-layer action representation to this target through a lightweight projection head. Across four strong WAMs evaluated on RoboTwin 2.0, LIBERO-Plus, EBench, and a real robot, PICA-WAM consistently improves robustness under visual perturbations, preserves nominal performance in simulation, and raises the real robot success rate. PICA-WAM further reduces the sensitivity of video features to task-irrelevant appearance and its propagation into actions, as shown by paired layer-wise diagnostics. Code: https://github.com/YudeZou/PICA-WAM-release
#05Oct 19, 2026
cs.CV
Beyond Omni: A Unified MLLM for Embodied Sensory Understanding
Shiyun Xiong, Dongming Wu, Peiwen Sun and 5 more
Recent embodied systems increasingly build on multimodal large language models (MLLMs) for their pretrained understanding and reasoning capabilities, but their perception of the physical world remains largely limited to basic modalities such as vision and audio. However, broadening MLLMs to more diverse sensory modalities from the physical environment is challenging: their representations are often weakly connected to the MLLM and vary substantially in structure and statistics, while their interpretation still requires shared high-level understanding and reasoning. We therefore propose Unisense, a unified embodied MLLM framework that supports diverse physical sensory modalities within a shared multimodal architecture. Unisense follows a two-stage training process: (i) aligning sensory representations with language to establish a language-accessible interface; and (ii) tuning modality-specific experts within the shared LLM to provide specialized processing for different sensory modalities. To support broad sensory learning, we curate Unisense-1M, a large-scale embodied sensory training corpus comprising 1M samples across 8 sensory modalities. We further evaluate Unisense on 12 benchmarks spanning depth, point cloud, IMU, tactile, thermal, radar, motion, and smell understanding. Across these heterogeneous sensing tasks, Unisense achieves strong performance and outperforms both generalist and specialized models on most benchmarks, demonstrating the potential of pretrained MLLMs as unified models for embodied sensory understanding.